Developing a R4D approach at farm-level - consultation and writing workshop

• Ken: Fun workshop. I'm not out as to how it should be done. Thank you for adding to my confusion.
• Fred: Interesting workshop. We struggled yesterday, more coming together today. The divide is more semantic. For me, this idea of project and combining tech together is worth. Stats are not going to answer this. How to carry out the combination of technologies is sthg to explore further.
• Barbara: I'm slightly confused as to what we can do with what we learned here and what we can apply in Africa RISING. I'm not sure this was the right way to go about it. I don't think we are where we needed to be. The M&E workshop should have informed this workshop a bit more to be more complementary
• Tesfaye: It was tough to apply the methodology, to test it it was tough. I was coping with this workshop. I have more insights but we want to do things that remain very tough. Lots of learning and for the methodology it's a bit clearer.
• Jens: THere was some confusion on the approaches. Grappling with diversity... it's us researchers learning. We need to be better aware of situating a technology in a given context. We tend to come back always to 'what technology'. I think it's more about the context than on the technology choice. We could have done a better job at integrating this with the wider program.
• Dave: I've enjoyed the most of this workshop - I agree w. Barbara about what the practical implications of the 2-day workshop are and I retain some confusion about the relation between the research and the development objectives.
• Laurens: Good reality check - good to ground this in reality with lots of smallholder farmers. Good to see it transformed into an applicable concept. It's the overall challenge.
• Beth: I found this workshop really useful. I heard a number of comments on the presentations about being quite different but I thought there is a lot that can be brought together. It's really unhelpful to put people in camps against each other, in relation with their background. We do better work together. I hope that this doesn't go towards the tech fit because we would lose a lot of perspectives we shared.
• Naomi: Very good experience for me, especially coming from the M&E meeting. Confusion: the M&E work which we are still struggling with. I hope we will come up w/ sthg useful and I like the fact we emphasised the role of M&E. I will convey that message to our group. I like the idea of doing the farm typology.
• Mateete: It's a continuing journey - we have a similar workshop for East & Southern Africa. I have some points to report there from here. Still a challenge to deal with typologies etc. Some of these specific messages are useful and this is a good guide for how to go about it.
• Jerry: Thank you everyone for coming. I appreciate you showing up for this. I echo the positive of being present in a group of people that have so much knowledge but also the frustration of not coming up with a firm conclusion and not being clear as to how to link this up with the wider program. But coming from the M&E workshop etc. some of this will spill over. Each meeting enriches the conversation. We are at a point where ILRI/IITA have to make a few big decisions. We will be overall satisfied that we consulted the right people. It's going to be messy and imperfect but we have gone through this process and it will inform us. I look forward to seeing how these small meetings are going to contribute to the bigger meetings. I missed this morning as I attended the Quick Water early win project. USAid is not used to this messy process. People are pretty nervous about it. We are reaching that climactic moment of big decisions. I've been surprised by the CG scientists community that it's a slightly different process. I'm hoping this will inform our work.
• Peter: On Beth's comment, this is what I'm taking away. We're looking at a participatory basis for technological options. We can pull this together with the right people involved. The right people working in partnership can do that so I'm quite encouraged working in the next 12 months that we'll go along this pathway targeting the right options for the right people. I'm reasonably confident with how we approach it. Thank you Diego for bringing a very nice mixture of people.
• Ann: This meeting has got a lot of complexity - I found institutional and technological innovation folks' comments very interesting. I see a lot of commonalities. I find for myself and those in my network a lot of ideas at what could be applied for locally relevant research for development and I'd hope we could have some linkages at that local level and broader level.
• Diego: I really appreciate that a lot of you could make it, you are very busy but you stayed until the end. This process started long ago with the different aims. It has evolved over the past few weeks and again over the past 2 days. I learned a lot. As many people said, there is no clarity on the outcomes of what happened these 2 days but there are many principles that we agree on - we didn't even have to discuss about them. We end up with a similar view on how to make things better at the farm level.